The Review of Contemporary Fiction articles from March 2001

The Review of Contemporary Fiction archives from March 2001

Introducing David Antin.
March 22, 2001... The work of David Antin--storyteller and narrativist, as well as talker, artist, performer, critic, poet, thinker, philosopher, and one-time novelist--attends a singular position within American art and literature. It does so not solely because...

An Interview with David Antin.(Interview)
March 22, 2001... The following is taken from a conversation between Charles Bernstein and David Antin that took place by way of E-mail over a period of several months in late 1999 and early 2000. This excerpt comprises roughly half of the conversation, the...

california--the nervous camel.
March 22, 2001... the reason i was asked to talk here is obviously that im not a native californian so i must have a clearer view of california coming from three thousand miles a way and theres a certain justice in supposing this because its very hard for fish...

The Intercourse of Life: Experiencing "the price" and "the structuralist".(talk pieces by David Antin)(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2001... David Antin's four books of talk pieces afford us a richness demanding and rewarding the fullest engagement of our minds and senses. Antin's work is continuously find sincerely experimental, and accepts the traditional challenges of experiments...

The Theater of Genre: David Antin, Narrativity, and Selfhood.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2001... narrative lies at the core of my ideas about the structure of the self --what it means to be avant-garde (92) the self itself is emergent in discourse --talking at the boundaries (10) [Prose is] "a cultural and ideological...

David Antin: The Hermeneutics of Performance.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2001... well now we have a problem with our overlong career of literalism overlong and singleminded its been so long now that many of us find it hard to understand the terms of any other possible career --David Antin, "the sociology of art"...

The Art of Thought: David Antin, Improvisation, Asia.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2001... Considering David Antin's improvisations, his talk poems, will lead to insights not only about Antin, but about improvisation itself. Comparing Antin's aesthetics with certain Asian artworld practices, we glimpse a central difference between...

Talk Poem as Visual Text: David Antin's "Artist's Books".(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2001... David Antin is primarily known as a brilliant talker, a performance artist or improvisator whose talk pieces belong, in the words of Michael Davidson, "somewhere among a standup comedian's rap, a storyteller's fable and a formal lecture."(1)...

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: David Antin's Art Writings.
March 22, 2001... Between a rock (the "concrete") and a hard place (the "abstract"), between the object (in itself) and its description (or reception), between the image (visual) and its meaning (whatever is not visual--written, spoken, thought, imagined): this...

Remembering David Antin's "black warrior".(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2001... In the past I have written about David Antin's work from several different perspectives in an effort to describe and analyze a cultural poetics for his talk poems.(1) In this instance I would like to engage in a more sustained act of close...

A David Antin Checklist.(Bibliography)
March 22, 2001... The following is a selected bibliography of David Antin's publications. Where possible and appropriate, I have indicated inclusive page numbers (this is not always possible for out-of-print works). For a concise but complete biographical sketch...

The Color of Summer; Or the Garden of Earthly Delights.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Reinaldo Arenas. The Color of Summer; Or the Garden of Earthly Delights. Trans. Andrew Hurley. Viking, 2000. 417 pp. $28.95. The Color of Summer is the fourth novel in Arenas's "Pentagony," his own term for a series of novels that treat...

On the Ceiling.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Eric Chevillard. On the Ceiling. Trans. Jordan Stump. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2000. 136 pp. Paper: $15.00. "[I]t is by fully trusting in appearances that one begins to reshape the world," declares one of the characters in Eric...

The Married Man.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Edmund White. The Married Man. Knopf, 2000. 310 pp. $25.00. The plot of Edmund White's latest novel, The Married Man, is simple enough: Austin Smith, a lonely, middle-aged, American art historian living in Paris, meets a young, supposedly...

The Natural Order of Things.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Antonio Lobo Antunes. The Natural Order of Things. Trans. Richard Zenith. Grove Press, 2000. 298 pp. $25.00. Antonio Lobo Antunes's previous books have earned him comparisons to almost every literary master of the twentieth...

The Melancholy of Resistance.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Laszlo Krasznahorkai. The Melancholy of Resistance. Trans. George Szirtes. New Directions, 2000. 320 pp. $25.95. The more one knows, the harder it is to stop shuddering. Whom may one trust? Who can say what more or greater horrors await as...

The Body Artist.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Don DeLillo. The Body Artist. Scribner, 2001. 125pp. $22.00. This taut drama makes a startling contrast with the historical spread of Underworld. The action centers on a couple and then a widow living in a large frame house in an unnamed...

Demonology.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Rick Moody. Demonology. Little, Brown, 2001. 320 pp. $24.95. Although most of the stories in this collection have previously appeared in various periodicals, a number of interesting effects occur when they are assembled in Demonology....

The Book of Tobias.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Sylvie Germain. The Book of Tobias. Trans. Christine Donough. Dedalus, 2000. 196 pp. Paper: $12.99. Sylvie Germain, like many writers and artists, is a metaphysician. She believes in the transcendental nature of simple objects: a peasant...

The Years with Laura Diaz.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Carlos Fuentes. The Years with Laura Diaz. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. 516 pp. $26.00. Carlos Fuentes seldom sets out to create psychologically rounded characters in naturalistic scenes. Instead, his fiction is...

A Heart So White.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Javier Marias. A Heart So White. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. New Directions, 2000. 288 pp. $24.95. This celebrated European best-seller opens with an unexplained suicide in Madrid forty years before the narrator is born, when the aunt...

Too Far Afield.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Gunter Grass. Too Far Afield. Trans. Krishna Winston. Harcourt, 2000. 658 pp. $30.00. Grass's wonderful novel is to be read by anyone interested in the role of literature at the end/beginning of the century. Like the sofa stuffed with...

All the Names.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Jose Saramago. All the Names. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. Harcourt, 2000. 238 pp. $24.00. All the Names is the story of Senhor Jose, a largely solitary and blandly consistent clerk employed on the lowest rung of the city's Central Registry...

Ghostwritten.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... David Mitchell. Ghostwritten. Random House, 2000. 448 pp. $24.95. Nine narratives told from a corresponding number of far-flung locales compose this ingenious first novel by David Mitchell. The wildly alternating voices and settings of...

Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Padgett Powell. Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men. Houghton Mifflin, 2000. 144 pp. $20.00. Padgett Powell's splendid new novel begins: "Mrs. Hollingsworth likes to traipse." And traipse the novel does, through wonderfully imaginative fog, surreal...

Stories and Remarks.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Raymond Queneau. Stories and Remarks. Trans. and intro. Marc Lowenthal. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2000. 155 pp. Paper. $15.00. Few writers can claim as various and influential a body of work as Raymond Queneau, and nearly every aspect of his...

Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Roger Martin du Gard. Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort. Trans. Luc Bebion and Timothy Crouse. Knopf, 2000. 778 pp. $35.00. The pace of this old-fashioned bildungsroman is geologically slow, the events of the Lieutenant-Colonel's boyhood...

Some Sort of Joy.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... John Taylor. Some Sort of Joy. Cedar Hill Publications, 2000. 149 pp. Paper: $15.00. John Taylor's latest is a "daybook." He recounts his various walks in a small French village, describing passages through various streets as he shops or...

The Elementary Particles.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Michel Houellebecq. The Elementary Particles. Trans. Frank Wynne. Knopf, 2000. 272 pp. $25.00. The French, in literature at least, love their bad boys, their Celines and Rimbauds, and Houellebecq, author of this best-selling, award-winning...

Daughter! I Forbid Your Recurring Dream!(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... James Chapman. Daughter! I Forbid Your Recurring Dream! Fugue State Press, 2000. 217 pp. Paper: $8.00. Readers of James Chapman's four previous novels--particularly his 1995 Glass (Pray the Electrons Back to Sand), an astonishing critique...

Piranesi's Dream: A Novel.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Gerhard Kopf. Piranesi's Dream: A Novel. Trans. Leslie Willson. George Braziller, 2000. 240 pp. $22.50. Winds of disaster blow through this fictional autobiography of the eighteenth-century Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Calling...

The Mystified Magistrate and Other Tales.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Donatien-Alphouse-Francois de Sade. The Mystified Magistrate and Other Tales. Trans. and intro. Richard Seaver. Arcade, 2000. 211 pp. $23.95. The Marquis de Sade is not known for restraint, either in the length or subject matter of his...

The Back Room.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Carmen Martin Gaite. The Back Room. Trans. Helen Lane. City Lights, 2000. 215 pp. Paper: $11.95. In the second chapter of Carmen Martin Gaite's hypnotic novel, the narrator remarks: "There is always a dreamed text, vague and fleeting, that...

The Time: Night.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. . Trans. Sally Laird. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2000. 155 pp. Paper: $14.95. Anna Andrianovna's night thoughts begin almost comically, providing an intimate glimpse of her life and thought as the Soviet hegemony...

Assorted Fire Events.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... David Means. Assorted Fire Events. Context Press, 2000. 181 pp. $22.00. In this new collection of stories, David Means is interested in "how people go about their daily lives... how they bide their time and what they fill up that time...

The Testament of Yves Gundron.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Emily Barton. The Testament of Yves Gundron. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. 305 pp. $25.00. Emily Barton explores noitons of society and societal changes in her first novel, The Testament of Yves Gundron, Yeoman Farmer of Mandragora...

The Name of the World.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Denis Johnson. The Name of the World. Harper Collins, 2000. 129 pp. $21.00. Denis Johnson is haunted by the ghostly remains of the Catholicism he once accepted. He writes about lost souls who cannot accept heaven or earth, and he recounts...

Mr Phillips.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... John Lanchester. Mr Phillips. Putnam, 2000. 292 pp. $24.95. John Lanchester's cookbook/novel The Debt to Pleasure, a formal experiment in the tradition of Nabokov's Pale Fire, poked fun at English elitism and Francophilia and gave us the...

Contagion and Other Stories.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Brain Evenson. Contagion and Other Stories. Wordcraft of Oregon, 2000. 152 pp. Paper: $11.00. With this new collection of short stories Brian Evenson further stakes out his own disturbing, sometimes hilarious, and always bizarre narrative...

Dream of Dreams.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Antonio Tabucchi. Dream of Dreams. Trans. Nancy J. Peters. City Lights, 2000. 136 pp. Paper: $10.95. "I have often been seized by the desire to know the dreams of artists I have loved," Antonio Tabucchi writes in a brief note preceding...

62: A Model Kit.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Julio Cortazar. 62: A Model Kit. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New Directions, 2000. 281 pp. Paper: $14.00. The love triangle at the heart of Cortazar's Hopscotch gave rise to prose in which desire was poured out in long, breath-taking passages...

Scar Vegas and Other Stories.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Tom Paine. Scar Vegas and Other Stories. Harcourt, 2000. 215 pp. $22.00. The stories in Tom Paine's first collection of short stories are filled with the ugliest Americans, although Paine's characters do more than simply sport fanny packs...

Best New American Voices 2000.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Tobias Wolff, ed. Best New American Voices 2000. Harvest/Harcourt, 2000. 434 pp. Paper: $14.00. Readers of excellent but somewhat predictable and homogenous fiction anthologies like the Best American Short Stories series will be excited...

Endorsed by Jack Chapeau.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Theodore Pelton. Endorsed by Jack Chapeau. Starcherone Books, 2000.80 pp. Paper: $7.95. Theodore Pelton's first collection of short stories explores an America plagued by media misinformation, conspiracy theories, academic sociopaths, and...

Capital Castles.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Mark Axelrod. Capital Castles. Pacific Writers Press, 2000. 192 pages. Paper: No price given. Mark Axelrod concludes his Castles Trilogy with another freewheeling quest novel that takes his artist hero, Duncan Katz, on a trip to Holland...

Fludd.(includes another review)(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Hilary Mantel. Fludd. Owl Books, 2000. 181 pp. Paper: $13.00; Hilary Mantel. Every Day Is Mother's Day. Owl Books, 2000. 225 pp. Paper: $13.00. The disturbing world of British novelist Hilary Mantel has until now been little known by the...

The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg: A Narrative Poem.(Review)
March 22, 2001... Edward Sanders. The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg: A Narrative Poem. Overlook Press, 2000. 252 pp. $27.95 Poetry, Ed Sanders wrote in his 1976 manifesto Investigative Poetry, must "again assume responsibility for the description of...

America: A History in Verse, Volume I, 1900-1939.(Review)
March 22, 2001... Edward Sanders. America: A History in Verse, Volume I, 1900-1939. Black Sparrow, 2000. 385 pp. Paper: $16.00. Poetry, Ed Sanders wrote in his 1976 manifesto Investigative Poetry, must "again assume responsibility for the description of...

This Craft of Verse.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Jorge Luis Borges. This Craft of Verse. Ed. Calin-Andrei Mihailescu. Harvard Univ. Press, 2000. 160 pp. $22.95. This series of six lectures was delivered extempore at Harvard in 1967-68, and Professor Mihailescu has transcribed, edited, and...

Manuel Puig and the Spider Women: His Life and Fictions.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Suzanne Jill Levine. Manuel Puig and the Spider Women: His Life and Fictions. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. 448 pp. $27.50. Suzanne Jill Levine's biography of Manuel Puig is a model of tact and gossip: she has included essential...

Jean Rhys Revisited.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Alexis Lykiard. Jean Rhys Revisited. Stride Publications, 2000. 281 pp. 11.95 [pounds sterling]. Impressionistic, roving, idiosyncratic, Alexis Lykiard's Jean Rhys Revisited is not a scholarly book, yet scholars and readers alike will find...

This Mad "Instead": Governing Metaphors in Contemporary American Fiction.(Review)
March 22, 2001... Arthur Saltzman. This Mad "Instead": Governing Metaphors in Contemporary American Fiction. Univ. of South Carolina Press, 2000. 232 pp. $39.95. Metaphor is the holy grail of literary art--an intriguing amalgam calling attention to itself...

Notes Home from a Prodigal Son.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Douglas Glover. Notes Home from a Prodigal Son. Oberon Press [Canada], 1999. 171 pp. Paper: $17.95. In this new book Douglas Glover includes essays on Christa Wolf, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, and Hubert Aquin; three interviews and a...

American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo's Dialogue with Culture.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2001... Mark Osteen. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo's Dialogue with Culture. Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. 299 pp. $42.00. Although there have been books (by Tom LeClair and Douglas Keesey) and collections of criticism (by Frank...

Books Received.
March 22, 2001... Alex, Kirk. Working the Hard Side of the Street. Tucumcari Press, 2000. Paper: $14.95. (F,P) Anderson, Robert. Ice Age. Univ. of Georgia Press, 2000. $24.95. (F) Ashbery, John. Other Traditions. Harvard Univ. Press, 2000. $22.95. (NF)...